Data Scientist

Data Scientist (UK)

• Reporting to: Data Lead
• Location: Flexible, with the option of using our London office
• Key purpose: To carry out data gathering and analysis for a project team
• Contract: Full-time, permanent role

The Role

We are looking for a Data Scientist who can apply and develop our techniques for analysing harmful content on social media platforms. If you have a talent for data-driven social media research and want to help stop the spread of hate and lies online, we want to hear from you.

The successful candidate will join a small team of data experts contributing to our projects, playing an important role in research that will be quoted by governments, journalists and academics. You will work closely with other members of our talented research team and collaborate with other teams to ensure our research has an impact.

To do this job, you will need proven experience of producing original and insightful analysis of social media data. Detailed knowledge of the topics we study is not required, but you will need to show a deep understanding of how social media platforms work and previous experience of researching social media or AI harms is a plus.

We know our work will be at its best if it is created by people with a range of backgrounds and experiences. We are keen to interview people who will add diversity to our team.

Job Responsibilities

• Carrying out advanced data collection and analysis to meet project team needs
• Communicating with team members to understand project goals and data needs
• Adapting data collection and analysis methodologies to meet new challenges:
• Collecting data from social media or AI platforms
• Processing text, image, audio and video content
• Analysing text and media using machine-learning techniques
• Identifying content containing hate, misinformation or harms to children
• Collaborating with other Data Team members to understand and apply methodologies
• Clearly communicating research findings in writing, meetings and visualisations
• Collaborating with the team on our quality control processes for datasets and reports

Person Specification

Essential

• University degree in a relevant field (such as social or computer science) or experience in a relevant profession (such as data journalism or think tank research)
• Strong technical skills relevant to analysing and extracting social media data, such as:
• LLM-based text analysis
• Traditional machine-learning for text analysis
• Rule-based text analysis such as regular expressions (regex)
• Using APIs to collect data from social media platforms or third-party tools
• Practical experience coding in Python, including packages such as pandas and NumPy
• Strong communication skills for collaborating with a project team to meet data needs:
• Explaining techniques, analysis and limitations to a non-technical audience
• Comparing strengths and weaknesses of available techniques for a given project
• Using Microsoft Excel to summarise results in a clear and accessible format
• Ability to exercise good judgment and resilience when working with challenging content
• A commitment to our organisation’s values and developing your research skills

Desirable

• Experience using data analysis to research hate, misinformation or harms to children on social media or AI platforms
• Extracting text data from image, audio or video content
• Extracting data using packages like Beautiful Soup or Selenium
• Experience of Natural Language Processing or unsupervised learning for text analysis
• Experience of using project management software such as Asana

Compensation Package

• Location: London, UK, hybrid
• Salary: £50,000
• 28 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• Extra Birthday Bonus Day off
• Christmas Period bonus days off
• Mental Health support
• Pension
• Flexible working
• Enhanced parental leave policies

If you need reasonable adjustments or have any questions, please do email us at [email protected].

The person should have a right to live and work in the UK upon application.

Closing date: 12pm GMT on Sunday 17th May

Goodluck!